Poll: How's your battery life with iOS 5?

How's your battery life on iOS 5?It seems like every time Apple introduces a new version of iOS, some people get slightly better battery life, most people stay about the same, and a ridiculous number flood our contacts, comments, and forums saying it's their worst battery life EVER.

Vote in the poll up top and then give us the great -- or gory -- details in the comments below. If you are having problems, let us know how you've tried to trouble shoot: clean install (not from backup), remove and re-add push accounts, delete and re-download notification and location happy apps, turn off Ping (always a good idea), turn of location Reminders, restart a lot -- what's worked and what hasn't?

The battery life was awful at the start of upgrade to ios5, then has consistently improved to where it is much better, however that is only if it is completely charged to 100%, which seems to be getting harder and harder to do. It requires me to unplug from ac adapter and restart to get beyond 72%, even then, sometimes only by attaching to 12v charger or usb on computer will it go to full charge. This is really bugging me as an overnight charge used to work fine!

about 3 days after the install, suddenly my battery wouldn't last even a half day where as before the update it lasted at least 2 days. You could literally watch the battery drain a percentage point every few minutes. It was getting hot as well. I tried all the suggestions to turn off various options, reset, remove apps, but didn't finally fix the issue until I did a full restore and back up from itunes. Now the battery drains some, more than before, but not much more. But, I figure that iCloud has to be taking something out and I like the security of the iCloud backup capability, so I'm ok w/ it. It is worth the extra drain.

I read about all sorts of problems. But after upgrading, I'm seeing absolutely normal maybe even better battery life. No problem at all. I will note I'm not using iCloud quite yet. And I've never used push for Facebook or Twitter . . . gonna have to try that.

WOULD NOT SURPRISE ME if it is worse...
these type of problems actually HELP Apple sell the next iPhone. Right on the heels of the iPhone 5.
This is one of the ways that they stay in business,
BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY---with iOS 5 - ALL users (those without mobilme accounts) - will now be giving away their private data including preferences, contacts, etc. etc. in exchange for "iCLOUD" usage. This means that in the near future, virtually anyone who owns an iPhone will be an open book for the data mining INDUSTRY and the government.
DOES ANYONE ACTUALLY READ THE PRIVACY POLICIES???
BE WEARY OF ANYTHING "FREE"...THERE IS ALMOST ALWAYS SOME PRICE TO PAY - AND MORE AND MORE, IT HAS BECOME YOUR "FREE" DOM.
The theme of the information age seems to be: sell out, or be left in the technological age.
OF COURSE, this is only MY opinion.

when iphones were on ios 4.1 battery life was near invincible. leave wifi on turn it off it didnt matter battery life was excellent. when 4.3 came along there was a immediate and noticeable difference. double clicking the center button allowed you to turn off apps in the multitasking menu which helped a little but could not return it to its former glory. The bottomline is the more stuff your phone can do the more work the processor does the more drain on the battery. The biggest increase in power drain has come from leaving your wifi on, where once leaving your wifi on simply didnt matter when it came to battery life now its become a sort of kryptonite. The main thing iphone 4s needed to come with was a more powerful battery to handle future software upgrades. i will be avoiding future updates as much as possible and actively looking for a way to downgrade.

This is my first iPhone, so I don't have an iPhone batter life reference point. I can say however that my 4S battery life is better than any Smartphone I've ever owned, including Windows Mobile, Palm Centro, Palm Pre +, And HTC EVO 4G. I top mine off with the car charger whenever I go somewhere in the car. Today I will test it without using the car charger and see how far I get throughout the day. I noticed that whether I use the wall charger, USB Port, or car charger, this iPhone chargers up faster than any phone I've ever had, making top off charges extremely effective.

In all honesty, I am pretty confused as to how you all seem to be experiencing such a rapid loss of battery life. I'm going to school in a small area of VT where you find dead zones by just taking a wrong flight of stairs. With iOS5 I'm not exactly doing a ton better, but iMessage has actually helped a lot. I start my day around 8am with 100%. By about 10pm, after using it for texts, photos, checking emails, adding notes/reminders, and maybe some Words With Friends here and there, my iPhone 4 is usually between 15-25%, 10% or under if I'm using it a lot.

I carry my phone for work every day... always have.. I havent played with it, I have an IPAD I play with. My battery use to go 2 days no problem with my normal use between charges. My phone has gone dead in my pocket twice in the last 2 days with nightly recharges. This is ridiculous.

I had a 32 gig 3GS and I could go about 2 days on a full charge with normal use. My normal use is making about 2 dozen phone calls that last about 5 to 10 minutes, check my emails, texting thru-out the day and browse the internet periodically for about 8 hours of usage. Now I have the iphone 4s and the battery life sucks. I am lucky to get 4.5 hours of usage from it before it is at 10% battery life left. I have tried all of the recommended tips with no success. I have even returned the phone to Apple and had them replace with a new one and still the same life. I don't know if it is because of the A5 processor or because of iOS5 but something has to be done if Apple wants to continue to brag about how they have the best battery life. Don't get me wrong, I love my new 4s but I just wish I could use it for more than 4 hours before having to charge it.

When I first completed the update the battery drain was unbelievable. The phone would not have lasted 4 hrs on a full charge. After speaking with the good folks at Apple it seems all of the issues I had with the update are fixed. The battery lasted almost 2 days after everything got straightened out

I've noticed a great deal of battery drain since I uped to IOS 5 on my iphone 4. In fact in the time it has taken me to search for this topic, I've watched my battery drain 3%.
My phone used to last a day and a half, but now I can't get more than 8 hours out of it.
I've tried a couple suggestions so far:
1. I've deleted mail accounts and reset the network settings to factory defaults
2. I've turned off iCloud
3. I've turned off the stock widget
4. I've turned off location-based reminders and most of the location-based apps.
Anybody have any other suggestions? It's come to the point where I can barely use this thing like I used to because I'm constantly afraid of killing the battery.

Installed iOS5 on my 2yr old 3GS (the battery was already starting to lose capacity) and got my 4S with it installed. 3GS lasted less than 6 hours.
Even thought I'm using 4S a lot, it's still at 60% after 10 hours. Very pleased so far. A cynical thought, but a ploy by Apple for people to get a 4S?

Wow...i have been using location based Reminders for a couple days, and I am quite impressed with my battery life! At the end of the day, even with location reminders set to "on", my battery is well over 75%!! Imagine that. Course, I haven't been talking a lot on my iphone, so that makes a HUGE difference. More talk time = less battery life at the end of the day...so...but yeah, impressed so far with my battery life.

Hose people having ios 5 issues with battery life. You need to turn off the setting for time zone detection.
His is eating up your battery life as it is constantly detecting your location but not telling you it is doing it.
Settings > Notifications > (scroll to very bottom of list) > System services > setting time zone > off

It was just sitting on the counter most of the day and when I picked it up to plug it back in, it had gone into its low power safety mode. I suspect that it has something to do with the wifi sync because that is the only thing I changed today.

I'm not texting any more than usual and I've actually strived to conserve my battery some because it seemed to drain faster but even after closing all apps, turning off locations, disabling wi-fi and dimming my screen the battery seemed to drain very fast.

Mine is HORRIBLE. This morning I unplugged my iPhone 4S (100%), took it downstairs in my pocket (it was asleep), ate breakfast and then unlocked it. The battery was at 80%. All that from just being asleep. Nothing was done on it. It's a bid ridiculous. Hopefully Apple with release a software fix.

I have a terrible battery life, it drains about 40% faster then normal. I have made sure that my wifi is off, that notifications are off (although I use notification centre for texts, missed calls and weather), and still there is an issue. It's annyoing. Any suggestions?

On the first two days after IOS5 loaded the battery life went from 100% down to 10% in about 8 hours - never happened this fast before, normally would be about 70%. I haven't really been using it more than normal. I took it off the charger about 30mins ago, it was at 100% and now it is 87%, I checked my emails on it and that was it.

Dont make me laugh! What new features does ios5 include that would tempt you into playing with your phone more to a point where the battery is losing 90% of it's charge in a few hours? The battery drain which people have experienced (which you'd know if you paid attention to the info people are feeding back) is that the charge is draining at a rapid rate whilst on STANDBY.

The battery life is horrible, I can see the percentage dropping in front of my eyes, every few minutes I check my phone 1 or 2 percent is gone!!
Maybe some apps are not compatible with ios 5 and are causing this?!!
I don't want to get 4S just for this, more than happy with 4.

Was on iOS4.0 on the 3GS right till the update to iOS5. And im getting better battery life so far. Almost 3.5 hours usage to 20%. Previously, I could only achieve that with 3G turned off. This was average usage with browsing, messaging, twitter etc. in an environment with very good signal coverage.
But the major difference is that I have about 20GB of songs chucked into my 3GS on iOS4, and only 4GB now in iOS5. I don't know if that serves any purpose.

I've noticed a big drop in battery life. I haven't played around with it much, but noticed Bluetooth was on and automatically connected to other devices I think (there were ticks next to them when I checked)
I turned it off and it's seemed to solve my problem!
Settings/General/Bluetooth/off

I haven't used my iphone 4 any more than usual, but since i've installed IOS 5 my phone has gone dead two days in a row. I actually watched the battery percentage drop from 7% to 2% in the time it took me to search for this particular topic on Safari.
I'm turning off all cloud-related apps and the location-base reminders to se if that helps.

I am not a happy Iphone customer at this point. All notifications, diagnostics, everthing is turned off or set to manual (like email). We went out for dinner and my phone battery went from 68% to 31% in 1 hour. Something is different about this update and Apple needs to fix it.

mine is a lot worse, in fact it will probably run flat from fully charged doing nothing in about 5 hours ! Ive tried everything from switching off notifications, wifi, email, etc etc but not much differnce. ive got an iphone 3GS with an old battery anyway but ios5 seems to have made it worse by over 50% !

my battery life on my iPhone 4 after upgrading to iOS5 is poor. It almost makes the phone useless. After only 1 hour I'm down to 50% capacity - and thats not will all services enabled....poor quality control

I turned my phone on airplane mode and the battery usage is normal again. I think for me the issue is signal. I started a new job on the same day I updated to iOS 5. The new building has terrible signal.

Never had any kind of battery problem until after ios5 install. Last night, a full battery completely drained out while in full sleep mode. Normally, the battery use overnight while in sleep mode is almost imperceptible.

Normally my battery goes down to about 60 - 50% by the time I get home from work, give or take, depending on my activities. Yesterday, my battery was down to 17% and I did not do much on my phone. I turned off most of my iCloud stuff, didn't use any location reminders, added and removed email accounts, and I'm at about where I should be, maybe a little lower. I'm used to battery use fluctuating slightly, but this was bad. Hopefully it's fixed for good on my phone.

I had the same disastrous battery life after the ios5 upgrade. The solution for me was 1. Turn off the weather widget and 2. Turn off the Stock widget. Both are in settings, notifications. After doing so my battery life is back to pre upgrade usability.

Total bs. Using it more.
Unplugged the phone at 7:30 am. 100%. Checked a few e- mails. Did nothing else. No phone calls. 1 text. Went to workout.... Now 10:21 and battery says 55%. Almost half in less than 3 hours???
It's an iPhone 4. Before upgrade never noticed battery issues.

Had to recharge my iPhone 4 with iOS 5 at lunchtime. Lost its entire full charge in 3.5 hours. Normal usage pattern. Idle for 2.5 hours of that time. Something is seriously wrong since the update. I can literally watch the battery charge ebb away in front of my eyes. It's dropped 2% in the time it's taken me to type this.

to be honest it looks like is a bug or something with the ios5 because i have hardly used my phone couple of texts and couple of 5 mns calls) and my battery has gone down to 45% and b4 with ios4 it was at least at 80something % no good appled! you need to fix this cos is really bad! :(

Your assumptions are wrong. If someone notices that the battery life is ebbing the first response is to do all you can to increase that battery life, which includes reducing usage. I personally turned my iPad completely off to increase my battery for the day.

I fully charged it and unplugged it at 5 am. I had it with me all day and took over 200 pictures without plugging it in. I'm on holidays. I plugged it back in at 9:00 pm and I still had 40% remaining. Can't complain with that!

My battery life has decresead significantly. The battery is also constantly getting hot when i M just texting. I never had this issue before. The os is also very sluggish. Wen I type the keyboard is delayed. I do like ios5's new features, but now even aomemof my apps will not work.
I would rather have good battery life, funtioning apps, and a faster ui than ios5.

After restoring my iPad to new and not restoring from a back up, I have to say, my battery life is much better. Initially after the update my battery drained from 100% to 50% in a matter of 3 or 4 hours without even touching it. No I did not play with all the new features. After syncing all my apps and everything back to my iPad my performance and battery life are outstanding.

Okay... So I've upgraded both my iPhone 4 and iPad 2 to iOS 5. Battery life on the iPad seems okay. Battery life on the phone is HORRIBLE! Something I have always done on the phone is turn all mail and those types of accounts to manual. Like, both in the usual push settings and also in each individual account. But I don't know what will happen if I set the iCloud to do the same. So, I don't know if that's a problem.
I know if you set a reminder with a "geofence," it turns on location services and theoretically that will run down your battery quick!
I need a fix quick! My battery is not doing well AT ALL!

Battery life seems way better in iOS 5 for me. I'm a teenager so most of my apps are games. I used to play fruit ninja often, and half an hour of gameplay used to take away half of my battery life. If i do it with twitter running in the background with me constantly pausing the game to check notifs, dead battery in an hour and 15.
However, with the new iOS, my battery seems to be a little bit better. After charging it fully last night at 10, i used it nonstop until 1AM. I was browsing on Safari, tweeting like a maniac on Tweetbot, messaging 3 friends on iMessage, reading NY Times and playing Pixel Ranger. When i was about to sleep, 48% battery remaining.
That's pretty good for me! :)

After the update, my iPhone4 16g can't hang on to the WiFi signal in my home. Never, ever had a problem in 4.3.5 or earlier, nor do I have a problem now with my updated iPad2. Tried a full restore, no joy. Can't find anyone else complaining about this. Hmmmm......

I went into work today.. Turned off wifi & location services then put my phone in my locker.. When i put it in it was on 45% battery 2 hours later when i was on my break it was down to 3%... Not been used for anything else... Just rubbish

Do you understand how the phone works? Weather and many other factors determine signal strength..so if the phone needs to work harder to pull signal through walls and lockers and other solid objects it has to use more power to do so. You may hate these types of comments but they do apply.

Battery life became unbeleiveably bad. Hardly used it after I installed IOS5 as I had to go out, within 3 hours, went from 100% to 37% with no use.
Last night around midnight, charged to 100%, turned off all location services, push mails, wi-fi, anything I could think of, and this morning, flat as a pancake....nothing, no charge at all, wouldn't turn on until I juiced it.

Same story for me -- I've turned off all intensive operations/tasks, closed all apps, left idle. I've been checking every 30 mins. by just clicking the menu button once, and logging battery percentage. The statics show about 10% battery loss every 30 mins.
Before performing these tests I've also restarted many times, and performed one hard reset.

I don't know if anyone has posted this yet. I was noticing significant battery loss on day one but then followed this advice.
1) Delete all email and calendar accounts
2) Delete all location based apps
3) restart device
4) setup email accounts
5) reinstall location based apps

I never had an issue with battery life on my iPhone 4; however, after I upgraded last night today at 4 pm I went to use my iPhone and only had 7 percent left on my battery. I did not use my iPhone last night any more than I normally do and charged it up over night.
I've disabled iCloud and push notifications. We'll see if this helps!

I've been watching Netflix on my phone for almost 2 hours-after turning off iCloud and notifications--only used 8 percent of my battery so far.
So, I think the iCloud was draining the battery, as well as notifications.

I kind of thought earlier today my battery was going really fast, but thinking about it I was using it and still playing. I'll give it at least a week before I complain.
Anyone who thinks it's real bad also might try to recalibrate the meter by running it all the way down until the phone shuts off and then charging all the way with the power adapter.

ive been using the hell out my iphone 4 since last year in july and the battery life really was starting to go downhill and then ios 5 comes out and its getting ridiculously long life. HUGE improvement though phone still pisses me off in a ton of other areas

My battery life is about the same as 4.3. Not that good at all. I went from 4.1 to 4.3 and immediately lost half of my battery life. Went back to 4.2 and saw a huge increase. Then my phone was replaced with a 4.3.5 phone, and I get 8-10 hours tops now. 5.0 seems to be the same for me.

Haven't had a problem. Only drained faster because I was playing with it more. Maybe those with issues have more features on than what was in ios4 since there's a ton more features in 5. Although I have more on and still have noticed any faster drain

Good question: "can I revert back to previous Os verstion?" Correct me if I am wrong, but per internet search, the answer appears to be NO (unless you jailbreak it). I've tried restore to a back up, no no backups prior to the one after update are saved on my windows computer. Back up to factory settings "like a new phone" still puts iOS 5 on phone (I know it didn't come that way last July 2010). Nether of these options appear to have helped.
Definitely a battery life issue for me (very bad, pre-iOs5 I could go a couple days w/o charging, and now with less use, it wont last a day), but I have asked many other iphone 4 owners who have noticed no change. I have diabled pretty much every thing except 3G and phone and messages notifications. (including cloud, location services, usually bluetooth, all those hidden in option things mentioned in several searches). There definitely some sort of issue with mail services (yahoo), and up until restoring yet again today, I thought there was an issue with my phone finding wifi promptly when it had no problem before.

MINE IS HORRIBLE. 4 Hours of use, (and I mean normal use: a few texts, web browsing, twitter, camera) and it died. Wifi: Off Bluetooth: Off One email set to push, Location Services: Off at about 30%. Ridiculous.

I have a 15 minute commute in the morning for work, I unplug my phone when I walk out the door & by the time I got to work my battery was @ 99%. Even though it only dropped 1%, it had never done that before. I played on it for about 20 minutes straight & my battery life dropped down 20% more. My phones battery life has NEVER been that bad. (iPhone 4 purchased in 04/2011)

My iPhone 3GS feels about the same. My iPad 1 seems to be getting MUCH worse battery life. I have been running the betas since beta 1, and the battery life seemed to be the same as it was before, maybe marginally worse at the most. But since installing the GM it seems MUCH worse. I am going to reload it with the official public release and see if that fixes it.

Mine will probably go down however as I am turning on more "push" services since the new iOS 5 notifications don't suck. But that's not the fault of iOS 5 directly, but instead now because iOS 5 works better - I am going to increase the usage of my phone...

It's not terrible, but there definitely seems to be SOME degradation compared to the 4.x I was using ( jailbroken ). Some of it definitely seems to be from location based reminders, and probably the number of notifications I get right now.

I'm thinking it's slightly better on my 3GS, though it's a small enough difference I could be imagining it... it's certainly not worse though.
Can't wait until I can afford the 4S though, really would like a full day of battery.

I love ppl who say that their battery life after an update is rubbish..!! Want to know why?? It's because you've pi$$ed around with the new features on your phone and used the it non stop since updating it!!
Christ!
Yes there are new features like iCloud that will use power when streaming photos and syncing, GPS when using reminders or friend tracking, but I've personally not noticed that much or a drain.
For me, there's no change, battery still only just about gets me through the day unless it's plugged in, no more, no less than before.
(Been using the beta for months, and the newer beta's were all the same as OS4.3)

Hehe,
I'm not worked up, just passionate about it...
It's kinda hard for my humour and demeanour to come out over a blog post, certainly not a flame or a troll!!
Just simply saying... chill out folks... all will be right after you've let your device settle :o)

Have you shut down and re started your phone? Done the "double click" on the home key and shut down applications running in the background? You may have a LOT of things running in the background that are killing the battery. When my kids are on my phone or ipod and have been playing games, if I don't shut the games down in the background, the battery life sucks.

@Patrick...this apps you see in that list after double clicking the home button are not running in the background. If they don't have select threads running then they're in a save-state which isn't using anything.

While I understand what your saying thats not always the case. I've done all my playing around with the betas. Today is my first day with the public release and I've barely touched my phone, my brightness is less than 50%. Before noon my phone was at 20%, that's never happened... NOT GOOD !!

Totally understand, people will and do se different outcomes, and my experience is certainly not what everyone will see. Its just these people who say OMG is appalling, Apple fix it now.. etc all that kind of stuff.... makes me giggle inside!
I"m just saying (which i probably should have posted originally) is leave it till tomorrow, and let everything settle, I'd bet money it'l be just the same as it was last week.

How much money would you like to bet, because I'll be happy to take your money. It is an actual, what appears to be, sporadic problem. I'm having the same issues the Beta 1 testers were having after researching it (so you should know better than to make inane comments). Just as bad as the "OMG" brigade, are the ones who think there's no issue just because they don't experience it.

Actually it is proving to be an ios 5 thing. I have an Ipad 2. I am noticing the same drain problem. Today I started with 100% battery I take about a 70 minute train/bus ride to get to my job. Normally i could watch a movie in this time and experience about 3% drop in battery power. Today, my ipad dropped 6%, double. So when I got to work I shut off everything that might be a power drain and I actually shut off the device to conserve power. When I got home this night my battery was at 76 percent and. The last time I had that kind of battery drain, I actually used the device pretty much the whole day to surf the internet.
Something is definitely wrong with this update.

Hope you didn't bet any money. It's two weeks later and it isn't the same for anyone who had the problems originally.
"Its just these people who say OMG is appalling"
Apple fan boys who don't think apple can do any wrong are more appalling.

My battery was nearly dead after 6 hrs and not being used at it was in my purse while at work. Problem was that all the notifications were running in the background shut them off and it will last longer.

Could have a lot to do with where you are at. If the service is in and out, that will drain your battery fast. The apps that are running in the background could have something to do with it too. I close mine on the regular!

A lot of people here stated they are not playing with it all the time. Not to sound arrogant but I've had iOS 5 since beta 1.. I know all of the features.. don't need to play with them. After this GM release.. the battery is definitely taking a beating! Can't figure out why.. but there is a problem. The phone sitting idle with no notifications on at all is still losing power fast. I've noticed before that these phone all work differently. I had a Rogers one that worked great, and it had a different screen.. (Brighter, clearer) the Bell one I have now.. not so good. It’s slower than my other 3GS..

Mr Hardy... You are rude and also wrong. I have purposely not even used my phone to see how the battery life responds with the OS5 versus the OS4.x (the latest). The battery life drops very quickly which did not happen before the upgrade. I turned off all notification, location, no iCloud, only the basic pushes (phone, wwf, text) which is a lot less than I was using along with the other suggestions I've looked at since the 14th.
I updated from a 3GS phone to the 4S and thought it was horrible and possibly the 4S phone but I went back using my 3GS, now on OS5, for two days now and the battery dropping like never before. It IS OS5.
If you want to tell us we don't know how we are using our own phone, consider presenting your opinion in a question or suggestion, not rudely and all knowing. I'm a system tester and know how to compare items and check for usage in an intelligent manner.
I can deal with the phone issues as I know Apple will come through but you, just hacked my peace with your haughty and wrong reply!

Simon I don't touch my phone and it dies. You non technical illiterate Apple users really saturate the market with idiots. People like you I have to support during the day because Apple passes the buck because you can't even figure out your own damn iphone,ipad, or iwhatthehellever.

WOW! you seem to know everything. What you are suggesting is your experience. There were more than 5 million iOS 5.0 downloads and you want to think your experience is the only correct version. Such audacity.....At least have the decency to acknowledge that other people might have legitimate issues with battery draining.

I agree. More features, more use. So far for me, I'd say it's the same as usual. I'm even trying the new location-based reminder thing, so my phone is constantly tracking right now, and the battery isn't draining any faster than it usually does. Of course, I'll have a better battery tomorrow when my iPhone 4S gets here. Muuhahaha!

My battery seemed to drain a lot faster today. I was at work all day, 10 hr shift, when I checked my phone after work, it was down to 18%
Before the update, this never happened.
I'm sure the bugs will work itself out, but there is def an issue with some phones, I think it has to do with the carriers...I am an AT&T customer, another co-worker had the same issue, however the Verizon iphoners who did the update, had no problems.
Strange..

I hardly touched my iOS 5 on a 3GS today.. 100% to 65% this afternoon. I talked to a friend earlier who said his is almost dead again, and it died on him last night while he was out. We both have all the pretty little features turned off. Too bad.. Apple just keep on sucking away. I used to be the biggest fan!